Frieze Magazine Archive Blurred Visions

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26/10/2013 16:58
Blurred Visions
About this article
What do drones see? And how can we see them?
Published on 24/04/13
By Christy Lange
In January of this year, the writer Teju Cole published Seven

Short Stories About Drones via Twitter. Each tweet
contained the first line of a famous novel, followed by a
sentence or two inspired by reports of drones in the news:
Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. Pity. A
signature strike levelled the florists. Coles short missives
provided a surgically precise commentary on the US
governments drone programme. On The New Yorkers blog
a month later, he discussed his motivations in more explicit
terms: Drones are discriminate, expensive and brutal. And
yet they are insufficiently discriminate: the assassination of
the Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud in Pakistan in 2009
succeeded only on the seventeenth attempt. The 16 nearmisses of the preceding year killed between 280 and 410
other people. Literature fails us here.
Does art fail us here, too? We see few statistics and even
fewer images of the United States use of unmanned aerial
Trevor Paglen, Untitled (Reaper

Drone), 2010, c-type print, 1.21.5
m. Courtesy: the artist, Altman
Siegel, San Francisco, Metro
Pictures, New York, and Galerie
Thomas Zander, Cologne
Back to the main site
vehicles (UAVs). How can artists and others visualize that

which we cant see? And what kind of alternative views can
be offered?
In the US, both the Air Force and the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) operate drone programmes, with an estimated
7,000 UAVs active as of 2011. While the Air Force has used
them primarily to aid ground troops in Iraq and Afghanistan,
the CIAs controversial covert programme deploys drones in
Somalia, Pakistan and Yemen to perform targeted killings of
suspected members of terrorist organizations. Remotely
piloted aircraft range in size from small devices, such as the
hand-held Raven, to the Global Hawk (nicknamed the flying
albino whale), which can hover at 18,000 metres for more
than 35 hours at a time. The mq-1 Predator, which is armed
with two laser-guided Hellfire missiles, is the cias favoured
drone and has been the most deadly UAV to date. These
aircraft are primarily operated remotely from bases in the
US, several thousand miles away from their targets in the
battlefield, via a satellite link.1 The country now has more
trained drone pilots than bomber pilots nearly 1,300 as of
February 2013 and by 2015 the military expects to have
http://www.frieze.com/issue/print_article/blurred-visions/
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more unmanned aerial vehicles than manned ones.
Mike Hahn, 3D rendering of MQ-9 Reaper, 2009, widely

circulated as a photograph of an actual drone. Courtesy: the
artist
Of course, drones are not only weapons. Many UAVs are not
armed at all, and can be used to carry out non-military
missions. Drone technology provides us with a new way of
seeing, and a vast new typology of imagery one in which the
line between voyeurism, surveillance and weaponized vision
is dependent on who operates the technology, and for what
purposes. The imagery provided by autonomous machines is,
as Harun Farocki described it in his 2000 film
Auge/Maschine I (Eye/Machine I), operational. Farockis
work examined what was then a proto-drone vision: the new
camera-equipped warheads deployed during the Gulf War in
199091. The footage from these missiles, which was
broadcast live on primetime US television, showed the
weapons zeroing-in on their targets, then turning to static
upon impact. These images lacked plasticity, Farocki
observed. The human scale was missing. Indeed, his words
seem to presage the characteristics of todays drone vision,
which also appears to lack plasticity. What we know of the
technology indicates that it is objective and panoptic. As
Farocki suggested, These images are devoid of social intent.
They are not for edification. Not for reflection.
What the public knows and sees about todays newly
expanded and expansive drone technology is limited and
obfuscated by those who control it. The US drone programme
remains veiled in secrecy, government crosstalk and
contradictory reports. Though it has been operating since
2002, the CIA did not publicly acknowledge its drone
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activities until last year. As of March 2013, the government

has refused to release the classified memos that contain the
legal justifications for their targeted killings. Images of UAVs
in the media are typically confined to officially sanctioned
press images of drones glinting in the sun on the runway, or
flying innocuously over an indeterminate landscape. On his
Tumblr, One Visible Future, artist and writer James Bridle
recently reported that the most widely circulated image of a
drone a Reaper dropping a missile while in flight is
actually a 3D rendering. Meanwhile, images of drone strikes
and their consequences are even scarcer. In The Predator
War, published in The New Yorker in 2009, Jane Mayer
noted: No videos of a drone attack in progress have been
released and only a few photographs of the immediate
aftermath of a Predator strike have been published.
Most disturbingly, the public has no access to definitive data
about the number of total drone attacks, their locations,
justifications or the number of casualties of either militants
or civilians. The UK-based Bureau of Investigative
Journalism (BIJ), an independent journalistic outlet,
estimates that there have been as many as 400 confirmed cia
drone strikes in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen, and as many
as 3,500 people killed as of March 2013. It also claims that,
in Pakistan alone, up to 500 of these deaths have been
credibly reported as civilians. Similar organizations such as
the New America Foundation, The Long War Journal and
Pitch Interactive have all made efforts to visualize the
details of the CIAs covert drone strikes via charts, graphs
and interactive maps and graphics. But they all admit that
the data is hard to verify because of conflicting reports on the
ground and vague information from the US government a
policy of obscurity perhaps best visualized in the US Air
Forces recent removal of previously published statistics of
drone strikes in Afghanistan.2
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James Bridle, Dronestagram, 2012. Courtesy: the artist

In October 2012, Bridle launched Dronestagram: an ongoing
feed on Instagram, Tumblr and Twitter that provides satellite
images from Google Earth of the approximate sites of CIA
drone strikes shortly after they occur. Along with the BIJs
database, Bridles project is one of the most comprehensive
attempts to map these events. Each satellite view on
Dronestagram is accompanied by a caption about the
circumstances and number of casualties, which Bridle draws
from records provided by the BIJ, Wikipedia and other
sources. Perhaps the most radical element of the project is
the counter-intuitive platform Bridle has chosen for it
Instagram, a medium that is defined visually by its unique
filter, and is more closely associated with nostalgia-tinged
images of dogs and beach holidays.
The posts that appear on Dronestagram almost weekly
(sometimes more often) range from images of dense villages
to deserted mountain roads. For the most part there are no
traces of human presence or physical destruction. We get a
sense of the abstraction created by the distance and
flattening effect of the drones-eye view. Though Bridles
project is a deliberate attempt to render these drone strikes
visible, the images and captions cant help but remind us how
little definitive proof and clarity we have about these
locations and their circumstances. A typical caption, like the
one accompanying an image of barren mountainous terrain
on 10 March 2013, reads: 23 killed by a strike in Northern
Waziristan on the Afghan/Pakistan border, riding horses or
motorbikes. Identities unknown. Rescue work was reportedly
delayed as drones hovered over the area after the strike.
The Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) maintains an
online database of Notable Drone-Related Sites in the USA.
CLUI mimics the bureaucratic opacity of the government; its
aesthetic and activities often seem to mirror the government
office that would provide this information, if such an office
existed. The CLUI database uses satellite images from Bing
and Google Maps to pinpoint the locations where drones are
tested, launched, stored and developed. In the main, these
aerial views picture beige desert landscapes, dotted with a
few nondescript hangars and intersected by freshly paved
runways. Though the views themselves are remarkably sharp,
they open up a suggestive, hypothetical space a way of
imagining the consequences of this infrastructure. The
relationship of the CLUI database to Dronestagrams feed
can read like one of cause and effect.
One of the Notable Drone-Related Sites is Creech Air Force
Base, the primary base from which drones are operated,
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located in a desert landscape strikingly similar to the

landscapes that the drones are surveying more than 11,000
kilometres away. Creech is sited on the Nellis Range
Complex, an area about the size of Switzerland, not far from
Las Vegas, Nevada, which is reserved for classified military
operations. As the satellite image of Creech reveals, beside
the hangars and runways, a small city of provisional
structures has sprung up. Here, drones are piloted by civilian
contractors or Air Force pilots who monitor their movements
and surveillance on up to 14 different screens. The pilots and
sensor operators are housed inside locked shipping
containers with no windows, kept at a cool 15 degrees
centigrade, working shifts that can last up to 12 hours.3
Nellis is also home to the Tonopah Test Range, the distant
lights of which artist and geographer Trevor Paglen
photographed in his series Limit Telephotography (2005
ongoing). Paglen photographed the bases from public land at
a distance of up to 32 kilometres, using equipment normally
employed for astronomy and astrophotography adapted to
his camera. Canyon Hangars and Unidentified Vehicle
(2006) pictures an indistinct horizon of blurred structures,
wavering in the heat that rises from the desert ground. The
image replicates the feeling of straining to see, of reaching
the limits of human vision. When you push your eye that far,
you see the places that youre trying to see, but you also begin
to see what the limits of your own vision are, Paglen
explained in an interview. Colours start to collapse, light
starts to collapse, images really collapse. For me, this collapse
of vision is a metaphor for looking at this secret world; the
more you look at it, the less distinct it is.4
We experience something similar when looking at Paglens
images of drones in the sky above the Nellis Range, Untitled
(Predator Drone) (2012) and Untitled (Reaper Drone)
(2010). To photograph the UAVs, Paglen wakes up before
dawn and drives out along a desert road to shoot their
training exercises with a wide-angle lens. Anyone looking at
Paglens photographs without knowing what to look for
would see a picture of a yellow or pinkish sky at sunrise,
brushed with wispy cirrus clouds. But then we strain to see
the aircraft that Paglens titles indicate are there, which only
emerge as indistinct black specks swallowed within the
colourful abstract swathes of a Romantic skyscape. Though
he could have easily rendered the drones more clearly with
another lens, he chooses to place them at the limits of our
vision.
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Site of the 2009, F-22A fighter plane crash, northwest of

Harper Dry Lake, California, photograph shown as part of
Down to Earth: Experimental Aircraft Crash Sites of the
Mojave, Center for Land Use Interpretation, Los Angeles.
Courtesy: CLUI Photo
These images dont tell us anything about drones per se, but
the gesture of pointing his camera toward the thing that is
theoretically watching him is a symbolic one. While the drone
hovering above Paglens head at a distance of several
kilometres could zoom in on the make of his camera, he can
see only a vague outline of the vehicle itself. The scale of
Paglens photographs of drones makes explicit the symbolic
distance between automated drone vision and our vision.
Paglens practice is grounded in his work as a geographer and
his fundamental belief that secrecy must have a visible,
spatial component on land. As he explained in a 2012 profile
in The New Yorker: If youre going to build a secret airplane,
you cant do it in an invisible factory. His extensively
researched publications are a counterpoint to the willing
abstraction and artistic cues toward the sublime that his
images suggest. His writing, in that sense, forms the
framework that props up the photos on the wall. But Paglen
is equally ambivalent about both approaches. He admits to
being convinced of the necessity of an objective observation,
and, at the same time, the impossibility of a truly objective
observation.5 I quickly end up in situations where the
question is, How do I point to, engage with, and represent
something that I dont quite understand? The answer often
has to do with trying to represent that epistemologicalpolitical gap or in-between space, or that moment of
incomprehension.6
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Paglens blurred and unresolved images could also be read as

metaphors for drone vision. If the satellite image used to
suggest the existence of WMDs before the 2003 Iraq invasion
proved one thing, its that there can be no clear picture. And
even drone vision, despite the advances in technology, can be
blurred, abstract or unresolved. Pilots and officials must
extrapolate their knowledge of 3D forms from distant 2D
views. Most UAVs are equipped with a sensor that can see
targets in detail from an altitude of up to eight kilometres or
more, although the image it returns is often black and white,
and always flattened and pixelated, arriving via a two-to-fivesecond delay. The sensor is equipped with infrared
technology that allows its operators to spot things like the tip
of a lit cigarette, the warm heads of soldiers camped out in
sleeping bags, or newly upturned soil. But drone pilots have
also testified that it can be difficult to determine women from
men, a camera from a rifle, or children from young men of
military age. With some sensors, once the operator zooms in,
the overview of the surrounding area is lost an effect that
pilots liken to looking through a soda straw. When a target
is identified, the operator deploys a laser beam (sometimes
referred to as the light of god), which guides the Hellfire
missile to the target. Hence the government often praises this
military technology for its laser-like or surgical precision.
But increased vision and accuracy does not always equal
definitive knowledge. Along with the euphemism of the
surgical strike is the similar-sounding but completely
antithetical signature strike the CIAs chief means of
targeting. Signature strikes are based on previously analyzed
suspicious patterns of behaviour for instance, a group of
what looks like military-age men convened at night a
strategy that has resulted in the US Air Force and CIA
accidentally hitting wedding parties and funerals.
As one CIA official confided: Believe me, no tall man with a
beard is safe anywhere in Southwest Asia.7
Like any surveillance technology, the intelligence it provides
is only as accurate as the human vision of those interpreting
it. A structure that emerges in the shadowy darkness on a
monitor still needs to be deciphered and analyzed correctly.
Which may be even more difficult when that imagery is a
composite of different screens and sources of intelligence.
The most advanced sensor the Autonomous Real-Time
Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System (argus-is)
is the worlds highest pixelated camera, providing a 1.8gigapixel video stream. It can simultaneously zoom in on 65
specific sites while maintaining an overview of 40 square
metres, from 5,000 metres height, while tracking every
moving object in its visual range. But even this technology
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functions by creating a mosaic of composite images each of

which comes from 368 tiny cameras and computer chips
identical to the ones found in smart phones.
Omer Fast, 5,000 Feet is the Best, 2011, DVD still. Courtesy:
the artist, gb agency, Paris, and Arratia Beer, Berlin
Omer Fasts 5,000 Feet is the Best (2011) represents the
human contingency of drone vision by mixing a factual
account with a fictional story, combining the aesthetics of
Hollywood film, television news-magazine exposs and war
porn. The films script is largely derived from an interview
Fast conducted with a former drone sensor operator, who he
found through placing an ad on Craigslist (after several
unsuccessful attempts to obtain an interview through the
official US Air Force channels). The title refers to the ideal
surveillance altitude from which, according to the pilots
account: I can tell you what type of shoes youre wearing.
Fasts film is made up of three repeated sequences with slight
variations, in which actors play the roles of the artist and the
operator. In the confining corridors and poorly lit room of a
Las Vegas hotel where the interview takes place, the pilotactor is shifty and uncomfortable, plagued by persistent
noises in his head, a result of virtual stress. In between each
of these sequences, Fast inserts excerpts from the real drone
operators interview, with his face blurred to suggest the
authenticity of this confidential testimony. As the anonymous
source describes the process of operating a drone which he
likens several times to playing a video game we see
gradually widening aerial views of a boy riding his bike in a
suburban Las Vegas neighbourhood, along with other views
of middle-class American towns.
The final chapter of 5,000 Feet is the Best weaves the actors
fictional anecdote with the drone operators account of a uav
strike during the war, accompanied by visuals of a suburban
family on a car trip that slowly morphs into a warlike terrain.
We begin to see black and white aerial drone views of the
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family being stopped at a checkpoint, where two men are

eventually struck by a Hellfire missile. The chilling effect of
Fasts work is the way he uncannily brings drone vision close
to home, in order to visualize events taking place in
landscapes we have no direct access to, or that we cant easily
imagine.
Fasts film is both allegorical and a quasi-journalistic account
of what drones and their pilots can and cant see. We are
given access to insider information, but we also question
what we learn from the anonymous informant, filtered as it is
through Fasts fractured and authored interpretation. But
Fast also deliberately reflects doubt on the truthful
possibilities of his own artistic approach. The most crucial
exchange between himself and the actor playing the drone
pilot is repeated in each of the three chapters: But youre not
a real pilot, Fast declares. So what? he replies, Youre not a
real journalist.
The 2012 book that accompanies 5,000 Feet is the Best
includes even more revealing, candid and graphic excerpts of
the original interview transcript. The pilots testimony seems
at times uncensored: he speaks of seeing arms and legs flying
off victims, and a head rolling down the street. But he also
boldly admits to the limitations of the technology and the
potential for human error: Things can go horribly wrong.
Like, you know, you gotta let off a missile and you have no
clue where it went. Thats one of the instances we all kind of
dread, you know. When it lands fifty feet away because you
moved all of a sudden.
But the public rarely hears about these incidents, or sees
evidence of their aftermath. And even those views would be
subjective. As Eyal Weizman pointed out in his 2012 essay
Forensic Architecture: The Thick Surface of the Earth:
Attempting to read and interpret the event from the images
of the trash and rubble left behind is a highly indeterminate
process. Earlier this year, CLUI hosted an exhibition at their
Los Angeles space entitled Down to Earth: Experimental
Aircraft Crash Sites of the Mojave. The show, in the typical
informational style of CLUI, displayed 11 aerial photographs
of spots on the earth (or sometimes no traces at all) of crash
sites around Edwards Air Force Base, more than 70 years
worth of launches and tests with experimental aircraft. CLUI
culled the photographs from an archive created by XHunters Aerospace Archaeology Team, a group of hobbyists
who have been documenting these incidents for 25 years. The
images, like those on Dronestagram, tell us little except what
the surface of the desert terrain looks like: a smattering of
dry lakebeds, shrubs, cactuses, rocks. But they are also, as
CLUIs newsletter puts it, accidental monuments to one of
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the most advanced forms of technology and human

endeavour.
George Barber, The Freestone Drone, 2013, DVD still.

Courtesy: Waterside Contemporary, London
CLUIs practice is an important model of individual agency
amateurs and artists, like Paglen, attempting to point to, or
trace, the blank spots in our vision. Efforts are being made to
add to the growing archive of drone images that might be
used for symbolic, rather than operational, purposes.
George Barbers video The Freestone Drone (2013), for
instance, stars an unmanned aerial vehicle, which the
London-based artist anthropomorphizes with a high robotic
voice and human thoughts and emotions. The Freestone
Drone never obeyed orders, so he decides to fly over New
York, sending back useless images of Starbucks cups and old
sofas. If we are to imagine, as Farocki foretold in 2001, a war
of autonomous machines, Barber posits the possibility of a
self-aware machine, who chooses to use poetry to describe
what it [is] seeing.
The spectrum of attempts to visualize what we dont know
about drones acknowledges the shortcomings of any possible
representations of those exclusions. These artists views
rupture the myth of a foolproof surveillance technology by
adopting illegibility and opacity as their own visual strategy.
In an age of the highest visual resolution, artists are making
images that are perpetually unresolved pointing toward
what we might not see or understand. These artists efforts
create a symbolic, second-order evidence, which might work
around the lack of plasticity that Farocki identified. Such
renderings remain open to interpretation, because they
operate within a symbolic system where obscurity can also be
plastic, or revealing. After all, it is a political act to show
things that arent otherwise visible to the public. These artists
ask hypothetical questions about what the impact would be if
we could all train our vision on the things that are being
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hidden from us the very things that can see us at the same
time.
1. In May 2012, Foreign Policy reported that the US also
operates UAVs from up to 11 foreign bases, from Afghanistan
to the Seychelles.
2. Brian Everstine and Aaron Mehta, AF removes RPA
airstrike number from summary, Air Force Times, 8 March
2013
3. Nicola Ab, The Woes of an American Drone Operator,
Der Spiegel, 14 December 2012. Most information about how
drones are operated was reported before 2009, when
journalists were still invited to Creech to sit beside drone
pilots. Since 2011, according to several sources, press access
to the base has been entirely restricted.
4. Aaron Schuman, How I Wonder What You Are, Foam
#22, Spring 2010, p. 153
5. Trevor Paglen, Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark
Geography of the Pentagons Secret World, New American
Library, New York, 2010, p. 127
6. Julian Stallabrass, Negative Dialectics in the Google Era:
A Conversation with Trevor Paglen, October 138, Fall 2011,
p. 13
7. Jane Mayer, The Predator War, The New Yorker, 26
October 2009
Christy Lange
is associate editor of frieze and contributing editor of frieze
d/e. She is based in Berlin, Germany.
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Frieze Magazine | Archive | Blurred Visions

About this article

What do drones see? And how can we see them?

In January of this year, the writer Teju Cole published Seven

Trevor Paglen, Untitled (Reaper

vehicles (UAVs). How can artists and others visualize that